Then Ralph had come bursting out of the doors, yelling, ‘I’m a swing-wing’, and had zoomed in circles around the pavement, making them laugh. Kanan had encircled her – soft, talcy whiff of violets as he’d raised his arms – holding her cheek against his. Ralph was off, dancing on the roadway, giving airport landing signals for a taxi.
‘I think your husband has been cruel to you. I will be gentle,’ he’d said.
They’d moved out of the light’s ambit, their faces no longer peeled naked by its glare. Her indignation had sunk back into the place she thought of as river-bottom mud, her foul, subconscious mind.
They’d gone on to the Coliseum – 1930s, soda fountains, toasted sardine sandwiches, frothed-up lime juice served in tall, scratch-bleared glasses. Then dancing at the Tin Mine, among Chinese dollies and young executives jumping and bumping, not sweating a drop. Then home, with the sickle moon riding above the jungle trees.
Judith fingered her belly through the thin blanket. The menarche for this month was just over – in four days she would still be safe.
20
Ralph poked his foot at the cat that was tucked in, asleep, on the rug that looked like a stained-glass window, inside his front door. The cat awoke and made its back into a dromedary’s blinking apprehensively at him. Kanan picked it up and said, ‘Kitty, kitty’. They had just dropped Judith off, a thousand metres away at the Residence. Kanan had decided to sleep the rest of the night at the Hamiltons.
‘It’s got fleas,’ Ralph said. He gave Kanan a penetrating, distrustful stare. There was nothing they could not say to each other, in theory, but the very tenderness between them created special taboos, as with lovers who will grieve inwardly for a partner’s shortcomings rather than try to challenge them.
‘The modest Indian householder. The man of chastity,’ Ralph said.
Kanan scratched the cat’s chin; it responded with ecstatic stretching and purring. ‘I hadn’t seen Judith then.’
‘Oh, that’s it! You usen’t to mind if they had faces like arseholes. I remember in an economics tutorial one day you said, “By definition, all women are attractive.” It was a bloody marvellous concept.’ Ralph didn’t add the rest of it, the presumption ‘attractive, so long as they adore me’, which each one did, until Kanan dumped her and found a new one to wash his clothes and write up his lecture notes. Ralph continued, ‘A marvellous concept – it encouraged me with Sancha.’ He gave a guffaw, which turned into a coughing fit – Ralph smoked too much – and flicked him forward.
Kanan noticed but decided not to comment. He made kissing sounds to the cat, saying between them, ‘Sancha … is … nice’. For him, the fact that Sancha was rich indicated that she had accumulated good karma.
Ralph’s spasm passed, leaving his face like crumpled brown paper. He was trying to recall the thread of conversation. ‘Anyway, what about you and Judith?’
Kanan had a look of sheepish pride for the confession he was about to make: ‘You see, she knows nothing. She is stiff and tense. She’s like a virgin.’
Ralph’s shout bounced around the stone-floored room. ‘Of course! Only Indians know how to live. All wisdom arose in Mother India. India can teach the West how to live, including how to fuck.’
‘We did write a book about it,’ Kanan said to the cat. He was not in the least disturbed by Ralph’s teasing. He knew his own attitude of mind was proper, and therefore his actions were proper.
‘Mild-mannered Dr Kanan Subramaniam reveals himself as Super Screw to enlighten … Oh, yes, the guru comes down from his mountain top.’
Kanan nodded amiably. ‘I will help her, isn’t it? That is an act of charity.’
Ralph grasped his friend by the back of the neck and shook him gently. ‘Well, good luck, you narcissistic bastard. I’m going to bed.’ He mounted the stairs, singing ‘Lloyd George Knew My Father’, wishing that Kanan would be a bit less holy about fucking Judith, the way he used to be in the good old days. Not that he and Lan would ever want to be involved in one of Kanan’s group scenes. The idea made Ralph recoil, the very thought that any other man had seen her naked. Her husband had, but he was a swine who had beaten her. Regularly.
People thought it must be sordid – so crowded, so dirty. They knew nothing. It was like a dream world, up there on Bidong, with her.
The black-and-yellow long-distance Mercedes taxi spattered the gravel of the Residence driveway as it pulled up. Judith, perspiring in the shade of the porch, ducked her head and saw that she would be the fifth passenger. An uncomfortably crowded trip, and without airconditioning.
The driver, a Malay in his fifties with a chimp face of dynamic ugliness and good humour, opened the boot for her one overnight bag – maximum luggage, Ralph had warned. Ralph had followed him round to the back of the taxi.
‘Have you spoken to Minou today?’ he asked.
Judith had barely seen the Hobdays since the trip to Bellfield. She had been working, either out on interviews or in her suite typing. In the evenings they had been at official receptions and dinner parties. One lunchtime in the foyer she had run into Minou, dressed as neatly as an airhostess, wearing a little pill-box hat. ‘French Ambassador’s wife’s luncheon,’ she had said and dashed out to her Citroen, shouting back, ‘I hope the servants are looking after you. I’ve got to give a speech.’
‘She’s flown up to Trengganu. She’s bought a kerosene fridge for Bidong – to store penicillin, and stuff. She wants to take it out on the boat with us tomorrow morning,’ Ralph said.
‘Hell! Did you tell her I’ll be there?’
‘No. Look, I can get you on to the boat. But she can have you off-loaded. You’ll have to play that hand yourself.’
He jerked his head towards the passengers in the car, then touched his forefinger to his lips. The introductions were first-name only. ‘Judith’s going to talk to the head of the UN in Trengganu, and get some local colour’, Ralph explained to the fellow passengers. None of them – two Australian immigration officials and a young Malay government official – seemed interested.
The official asked a few questions in English, in a tone of noblesse oblige, then returned to his mother-tongue discussion with the cab driver, who chuckled and wheezed. The Malay had the excessively neat clothes of all bureaucrats in recently de-colonized countries; in comparison to him the Australians, dressed in shorts and sandals, looked as offensive as over-flowing garbage bins in a florist’s shop. One of them was exceptionally tall. He seemed worn out from the heat already, although he was only in his late twenties and the trip had just begun.
He said, ‘I sleep every five days. Get rotten and go to sleep.’ He was returning, he explained to Judith, to Mersing camp where he worked in four-day stretches, sixteen hours a day, interviewing, selecting, rejecting. He spoke a Chinese dialect and Vietnamese. Learnt where? Judith wondered, and looked at him more closely. He had the blunted, hostile eyes of a man who has seen too much, too young.
The presence of the Malay made conversation difficult.
‘What do you eat at Mersing?’Judith asked.
He shrugged. ‘Your stomach shrinks,’ After a silence he added, ‘I like raw fish.’ The Malay turned round and flicked his eyelids with disgust.
The car was passing abandoned rubber estates, the trees elongated and struggling against a choking undergrowth of vines. At Gombak a police jungle unit blocked the road: guerrillas had fired some rockets there that week. The Australians fell silent. This group of Chinese sympathizers and admirers (Who, in Australia dared not admire China these days? Or scorn Islam?) were being held up at a police check because of a decades-long war fought by Chinese, men who only saw daylight when they emerged to murder policemen or steal provisions. The Malay smiled and chatted to the cops. They were waved through and began to climb into the Genting Highlands, where the air became cool and milky soft. There were fish-farms in the villages below, but few signs of habitation. Apart from the rectangles of water reflecting the sky, fields of rice and cassava, and the smoo
th black road – built by the USA, a road made for army trucks – there was only jungle. It was extraordinarily green and quiet. And oppressive. It stopped their desultory chat with its weight. Even the two Malays were affected by it and fell silent. Judith thought again how unequal she, or any of them, was to coming to terms with this environment.
Planters had gone quietly mad from the oppression of these ancient trees; the Malays themselves had invented a vast demonology, and magic rituals for mollifying demons, to help them cope with it. This was the proper domain of tigers and tapirs and seladang, the forest bulls which would trample incautious hunters to death. One had killed a chief of police; its beautiful head, with horns two and a half metres across, was now mounted on the wall of the police mess, and had been drawn, proudly, to Judith’s attention at lunch the day before. It was a merciless environment. The thought raised something hazy in her mind, and she frowned, grasping for it then giving up.
‘If you put lime juice on it you don’t get scurvy,’ the giant remarked, still brooding on his dietary fetish. ‘People think you don’t get scurvy if you eat chillies, because they’ve got a lot of vitamin C. But chillies go straight through you. And you get scurvy all right. Gums bleed. That’s the start of it.’
‘Does the interviewing get you down?’ Judith asked. The Malay had gone to sleep, the way they could, just anywhere.
He considered this for some time. ‘Nup. Used to. When you’d give somebody the card “acceptable for Australia subject to medical” and they’d cry and kiss your hand. One time that would upset me. But you get used to it. The ones you reject – they don’t show anything. Just bow and walk away.’
‘You never know what they’re thinking,’ the other man, all blond and muscly like a footballer, put in.
‘What can they say? You’re sentencing them to death,’ Judith said.
Nobody responded.
Ralph, whose suntan had turned yellow in the course of his days in KL and who looked to Judith as mean-tempered again as when she had first met him, raised his eyebrows high, like a fading actress at a risque joke.
The giant and the footballer, dragging boxes of immigration papers and rucksacks pregnant with bottles of whisky, got out at the Kuantan taxi station. Their departure, the extra room, but above all the changed landscape lifted the feeling of reticent gloom that had filled the car. They had travelled through the thumping green heart of the country and were now on the East Coast. The road ran through coconut groves of squat young trees with yellow fronds shading clusters of orange fruit the size of human heads. Through the trees, across white stretches of beach, they could see from time to time, a smooth, celadon glaze stretching to the horizon – the lovely, treacherous South China Sea. This afternoon it was as still as a painting. There were Malay kampongs here and there, clusters of wooden shacks with corrugated-iron roofs crumbling with rust.
The government official turned to Judith and said, smiling blandly, ‘You’ll never see Chinese living in houses as poor as those.’
The cabbie wheezed and laughed and regaled them in English on the subject of how much rent he had to pay for his cab to its Chinese owner. He had two wives and six children to support. ‘We can’t eat,’ he said, grinning at the monstrous joke life had played on him. ‘And the big men tell us this is the richest country in ASEAN.’ His hands flew off the wheel, that same, helpless gesture. But more derisive.
The government man seemed to take this last remark as a personal affront, and changed the subject. He pointed out to Judith a stretch of lustrous water where, two weeks earlier, a senior bureaucrat and his wife had drowned. ‘They say the undercurrent is so strong at ebb tide that it feels like hands grabbing you by the ankles. The village people say it is the hands of the Goddess of the Deep. Unless you know the area, it is suicide to swim here.’ He appeared satisfied that he had re-established his authority with this information and fell silent.
The road veered inland again, through an area of violation. Whole hillsides had been slaughter-hewn and left with the greying corpses of trees, apparently not worth drawing to the timbermills, among the stumps of better quality trees. Passing the mills the air was fragrant with camphorwood scent. Occasionally there were more poor Malay villages, unpainted houses built on stilts with a few bougainvillea vines straggling out of kerosene tins, some goats and chickens, and naked babies carried on the hips of older sisters who wore the discarded dresses of grown women. Then there was jungle again; then hillsides covered with what appeared to be an invention of science fiction – monstrous green hairy spiders. A million of them, nesting leg to leg over the hillsides. ‘Palm oil estate,’ the Malay said approvingly.
One hillcrest away a brilliant red dot appeared. The cabbie squinted at it and muttered in Arabic. The government man, too, was agitated.
‘Pull over! Pull over, man!’ Ralph said.
The red bullet was coming straight for them. Ralph and Judith cringed involuntarily as the noise from it increased to a crescendo. Small rocks tattooed against the side of their car, which the driver had managed to swerve to a stop in the long grass beside the road. They all turned to stare at the red Lamborghini which had blasted past. For a number plate it had a gold crown.
‘One of your Sultans going for a spin?’ Judith said.
The official looked sulky; he and the driver fell into a spirited discussion in Malay which, from his ironic gesticulations, the cabbie seemed to be winning.
Ralph took the opportunity to lean to Judith’s ear and whisper, ‘Have you ever seen someone stoned to death?’ He smiled at her horribly.
‘Of course not,’ she replied crossly.
‘Maybe you’ll have a chance to.’ The road had retouched the coast and they were driving past a grove of tall, voluptuous palms. Ralph looked out to the sparkling sea. ‘This is ideal weather for boats to land,’ he said aloud. ‘There’ll be a few coming in if it stays as calm as this.’
The Malay nodded, his jaws tight. Judith thought of Minou’s toast ‘To iron boats!’ and the screaming she had heard in the night. ‘Where’s the turtle beach?’ she asked.
Ralph nodded towards the ribbon of white sand where a few ramshackle palm-leaf shelters were built close to the line of coconut trees. ‘Right here,’ he said. There was some low, seaside scrub between the road and the palm trees. Ralph squinted at it. ‘Did you see a car in there?’ he muttered to Judith.
She had not. Ralph tapped the cabbie on the shoulder. ‘Just stop and go back for a minute, please. I thought I saw something back there.’
They returned the few hundred metres, Ralph and Judith bent forward, staring out the window. ‘Nope. Must have been a mistake,’ Ralph said. He and Judith glanced at each other. Both of them had seen the rear mudguard and some of the central panelling of Minou’s Citroen concealed in the scrub.
When they stopped a while later to buy some bananas at a road stall Ralph muttered quickly, ‘She must have sent the car and the driver up, while she flew. Jesus Christ, that was the beach where they stoned a whole boatload in January. The ones who weren’t dead they threw back to drown.’
The government man was walking towards them, offering bananas.
‘Thank you very much,’ Judith said, surprising herself by the false, ingratiating tone in her voice – the ease with which she had been unnerved, not by this man but by what he represented. If she, an outsider was unnerved, how much more easily were those who lived here, who were pushed up against the furnace of Malay resentment and its violent manifestations? People like Kanan. She felt, for a moment, as if a grave had opened.
The man was smiling at her, nonplussed by her enthusiasm for bananas. ‘That’s my pleasure. Please. You are a guest in my country. Please enjoy yourself,’ he said.
As Kuala Lumpur was Chinese, Kuala Trengganu was Malay and therefore, Islamic. The town, as shabby as an armchair with its stuffing coming out, had grown out of a fishing village built on the entrance of the Trengganu River. It was so flat that from one side of town you could see the
uneven white domes of mosques on the other. There was a roundabout on the main road encircling a statue in tin of a leatherback turtle. The turtle was less than symmetrical and its paint was peeling. The government man said, ‘Nobody knows where these animals live, but they build their nests in only three places in the world – Costa Rica, Surinam, and Trengganu.’ His tone indicated that this was a victory for the Malaysian government, against some other government. Thailand’s, perhaps.
The taxi lurched into traffic and Judith had the discomforting impression of being half-naked: there was not a bare female arm, head or calf among any of the women and girls who were strolling, slip-slop on plastic sandals, along the pavements. Her short-sleeved shirt and knee-length skirt suddenly seemed immodest. On shops the signs were in Arabic script and their colours were muted; the exuberant red-and-gold signs of KL, with their huge optimistic ideograms, were hundreds of kilometres away, and several centuries. Every restaurant they passed advertised its purity for Moslems with a halal sign; enamel bowls of greasy curries were displayed in their windows, the cynosure of flies. The government man got out at one. In the fasting month the religious police patrolled the streets with truncheons, Ralph said, as soon as the man was out of earshot.
The late afternoon heat was like a buzz in the air; it had sucked up from the river mud, the fishing fleet, the markets and the flat dusty streets in which goats rummaged through garbage, the smell of old fish, and it breathed this over their heads.
On the ceiling of Judith’s room in the Pantai Motel there was an arrow indicating the direction of Mecca. The room was cool and green-furnished – what else, but the holy colour in an Islamic town? – and overlooked the sea. And other things.
‘This is where it all began,’ Ralph said. He had joined her on her balcony to watch the day expire in a lilac-grained change of lighting which united the sea and sky. There was a breeze now which carried both the sea and the scent of frangipani from the gardens below. Judith thought, In two days Kanan and I will be together on this balcony, and felt for a moment that she would jump on to the railing and dance.
Turtle Beach Page 20
